


your typical two-person funeral afterparty

by Ashling



Category: The Crown (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e09 Avalanche, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, aiming for angst that resolves somewhat hopefully as requested, first off this is pure fiction, got so mad at the real life Charles the other day I almost deleted this fic lmao, let's agree on two things right off the bat., please make no mistake I’m not a monarchist and the irl Charles can rot, second charles is massively in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:20:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29368401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Relationships: Camilla Duchess of Cornwall/Charles Prince of Wales
Comments: 6
Kudos: 19
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	your typical two-person funeral afterparty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [triplesalto](https://archiveofourown.org/users/triplesalto/gifts).



He does not go home that night. He doesn't even change out of the suit. Out in the country, the sunset has long arms, and it makes the drive stretch into one endless swathe of gold. He is driving into the sun. Good. The less real it feels, the better. When the color fades into black and white, that is best of all.

When he arrives to the house, there is not a single car parked outside, and for a moment he stares, stricken—this is the one thing he had not anticipated—until he realizes that one of the lower windows is full of light. A lower window, and it eleven at night. He could not get away for so long, and then the drive. She doesn't wait up for him. Or maybe she has done it once before, and he can't remember. No, he would remember. He rubs his eyes and extracts from his car, lumbering heavy-limbed and loud through the mucky gravel of the drive until the door swims up to him and he opens it without checking to see if it's locked. That is one notable thing. She never waits up for him, but the door is never locked.

As soon as he's inside, the warmth and the smell hits him. The foyer is small, crowded with a coatrack and shoe shelves, and there isn't much air to disperse what seems like three packs of cigarette smoke, but Camilla is standing there, already, and nothing else matters. She says his name, once, and he sways into her, forehead going down on her shoulder, breaths lengthening in a helpless attempt to stop them from shuddering, and her arms around him are tight, so tight it almost hurts. Her fingers dig in, the smell of smoke is worse in her hair, and he noses into her neck and hopes she'll let him stay there for hours.

It takes significantly less than hours for the exhaustion to come back to him, and the hunger. It is hard to keep up a pure single-mindedness when they're both snot-nosed, too, and eventually he pulls back a little, they both blow their noses, the foyer is not gold but yellow in the light, he almost trips over a stray child's shoe. She catches him, steadies him, then loosens his tie, tenderly. Over her shoulder, he sees an ashtray on the stairs, practically overflowing. Camilla catches him looking, and an expression he can't place passes over her face and is gone again.

"Come to bed," she says, and he does. Goes up, stocking feet on wooden stairs, leaves the funeral suit in a heap on the floor, and crawls headfirst into a dark, thick, soft sleep, all-consuming and mercifully dreamless.

It is cruelly early in the morning when the telephone rings, which is made worse by the way Charles starts at the sound beside her. She had her head close by his on the same pillow, turned so she could hear his quiet breaths; he was on his stomach, head turned towards her; now he knocks into her, and they both come away rumpled and frowning, him rubbing his forehead. He's like a child, this tired. Innocent. She could kill a lion with her bare hands over that.

"Go back to sleep," she says, one hand on the slope of his bare shoulder. He blinks up at her, confused. Even this exhausted, he knows, as they both do, that the telephone must be for him. It's still ringing. She will rip it out of the wall. She must be tired, too. This is unlike her. She leans down, meaning to kiss his freckled cheek, misjudges the angle and kisses near the corner of his eye instead. Good enough. When she gets up out of the bed, she walks to the bedroom door and turns to look back at him; his head is back down on the pillow, his eyes closed. 

The man tells her that the Queen wants to speak to the Prince of Wales. She tells him that he is not available right now, in a voice that was made for this occasion, the sort of voice she pulls out when her youngest has spilled something on himself yet again. Reproving, but not malicious. She's expecting to go several rounds with him over it. She gets someone unexpected, instead.

"Mrs. Parker-Bowles," says the Queen, like they've come across each other at a springtime tea party, because of course she fucking does.

"Your Majesty," says Camilla, because as always, there is only one correct response, and it's been in place for centuries.

"I would like to speak with my son." And there's the possessive. Camilla can't call him 'my' anything, though he is more hers than anyone else's, for better or for worse.

"He is currently asleep, ma'am. Is there anything else I can do for you?" The resulting silence is long. Too long. She resolves that if she is ordered to wake him up, she won't do it. She's frightened to find out what she will do, or won't do, if she's pushed. But the Queen takes an entirely different tack.

"Do you know," the Queen says, in exactly the same inflection as Camilla's grandmother, so that she has to stop herself from interjecting the usual obligatory little _mm?_ in response. "I thought he was dead. Only for a few minutes, of course." Like that last modifier helps at all. Like they are making polite conversation. The glint of accusation is more than clear enough.

And what is she, Camilla, supposed to say? _So did I?_ She did. She did. She suspects Charles knows this, or will at least figure it out sometime soon. She has been expecting something awful to happen for a long while now, though for some reason she always expected the brunt of it to fall on her, not him; it's a pattern response, really. The married woman always gets it far worse than the married man. When you know damn well that if the world knew you, it would like you to suffer, you start expecting to suffer. She read in an article that he had helped to dig the corpse out of the snow with his hands. She'd stop seeing him if it would help, but that would be irrational and she is not an irrational woman. She'd stop seeing him if she could take back an avalanche. Nobody can take back an avalanche, not even the Queen.

"That must have been very hard," she says, and hears how insincere that sounds, how stonehearted. She has got a full working heart, actually, and her own children, but the gnawing hunger in Charles was seeded there by someone and the prime suspect is on the other end of the line. The Queen has the entire rest of the family, the entire rest of the country, to sympathize with her. To comfort her. Whatever Camilla has is in reserve for somebody else.

"Well," says the Queen, and it occurs to Camilla that they are the both of them going against their basic instincts. Stiff upper lip, all that. The Queen must have hated to say it. "Do tell him to come back before three. His father and I would very much like to speak with him."

That can't be good. Both parents in the same room at a specific time means a certain formality. A certain purpose. "I will be sure to tell him, ma'am."

"Thank you." When the Queen hangs up, Camilla thinks, for a second, that she got off easy.

And then, because it is eight in the morning, or because she had to read that he dug through the snow in an article, or because she was not invited to the funeral, or simply because she hasn't so much as broken a plate on accident in something like ten years and she's far overdue, she does actually reach into the kitchen drawer, take out a pair of scissors, and cut the telephone cord.

He recognizes the wallpaper pattern immediately, and smiles to himself over it for a second before he turns to look for Camilla. She's sitting beside him in a robe, reading a small green novel and frowning slightly over something in it, and no woman should look this radiant when her hair is still wet from the bath. It isn't right. She looks over when his hand's on her knee. He reaches and cups her cheek, and it's amazing how something as simple as her hand grasping his wrist can be such a profound caress. She does love him. There's no denying that, is there.

He had worried about how she would get the news, when they had bundled him in a blanket for shock and a doctor was examining him. He had his mouth open so the doctor could peer into his mouth, God knew why, and he had wondered if he asked one of his friends to telephone her, if they would, and if they would pass on the message he wanted, or if instead it would somehow get round to his mother, as everything inevitably did. So he hadn't done anything until he could get to the phone himself, and that had taken a long time. Now he wishes he'd taken the risk.

It's easier to kiss her than to talk about it. She's soft against him, yielding, and the belt on her robe comes undone at a yank and there's nothing else underneath. Her soap smells of thyme and lavender.

Afterwards, she cracks open a bedroom window and lets her cigarette smoke drift out into the sharp cold wash of air. Her hair is still damp, and he's still watching her, his hand on her thigh, just because.

"Your mother called," Camilla says, and he takes his hand away.

He wasn't going to bring it up, but since she did: "How bad was it?"

"She wants you back at three." A long exhale, white plume. Considering the drive, this means that he has less than an hour before he has to leave. She waited until there was barely any time left until she told him; that is a gesture, he thinks, even if it's not one he can parse.

But he doesn't have time to puzzle it out. Focusing on this meeting is like hauling himself up out of sleep. Gas for the car, clothes, breakfast. It's closer to lunchtime than breakfast, but if it's his first meal of the day, it counts as breakfast. "Do you have any eggs?"

"Don't go."

That brings him up short. She is looking at the far wall, at the wardrobe, maybe, or some far-off space. "What?" he says.

"Charles, it's a meeting with your mother and your father, an appointment," she says. And, looking at him this time: "Don't go."

An appointment, of course. There's only one thing that can be about; there's only one thing they care to talk about with him, nowadays. God, but it's so boring, so predictable. And this, this is exactly the opposite.

Camilla doesn't ask him for anything. For favors, presents, gestures, promises, or sacrifices. He'd like to give her far more than she'd like to receive. This has to be a first, and yet it doesn't entirely surprise him; why? He sets that aside for the moment.

Later on, much later, he'll realize why he wasn't surprised. At a house party, the first public outing they both attend after the avalanche, after the meeting, after almost everybody involved unofficially gives up on his marriage. Camilla brilliant in a rose-colored dress, murmuring an aside into his ear, "Sir..." and he hears nothing after that. Finally he realizes it. She always called him _sir,_ whether they were at a polo match or in her bedroom, and when they were younger, he was stupid enough to enjoy it, but after a couple years, they came to know each other too well for him to enjoy it any more. After a few years, he saw it more clearly. He saw it as a distance. He saw it as a matter of discipline, on her part. At that house party, he will remember all this, and see how Camilla only calls him _sir_ in public now. She never forgets to do it, but to have her that much closer in private is worth having another mountain thrown on his head. It'll all come to him later. He'll see how it all started later. For now, he's working on instincts alone.

"Of course I'll stay," he says. Somewhere in the back of his skull, there's a twinge of alarm, but he ignores it. "For as long as you want me."

She smiles a small smile and says, affectionately, "Maybe not that long."

"Why not?" And then, when she doesn't reply, he says, "Marry me."

She chucks her spent cigarette in the windowsill ashtray and pulls a face at him, half reproof and half amusement. "I'm going to go make those eggs. Are you happy now?"

"Yes," he says, flouting sentimentality like a dare, almost smug in it. He is under her roof. Why even ask the question. "I am."


End file.
